GIVE YOUR BOILIES EXTRA PULLING POWER!
JIM WILSON has enjoyed a great summer of catching big carp by boosting the attraction of the boilies he uses. You, too, can give your baits an extra ‘edge’...
BOOSTED BOILIES GIVE JIM WILSON BIG HITS OF FISH ON DAYS WHEN THEY AREN’T NORMALLY HAVING IT WITH ANY ENTHUSIASM...
I HAVE been enjoying some fantastic action this summer on my new syndicate water. It holds a good stock of carp – more than 350 fish in 30-plus acres – including some big ones too.
I didn’t really start fishing it until the summer months, and what a summer it’s been so far. With it being so warm for such a long time, the fish have successfully spawned on a number of occasions at venues across the country. With that, they are totally empty and in desperate need of replenishing their food reserves.
Essentially, they are hungry, and will be looking for big beds of food. The natural food larder is full, but exploiting this takes up a lot of their energy for little reward.
As a result, it’s our baits that they will turn to in order to ‘fill the gap’, as boilies provide an easy meal and one that’s packed full of nutrition… providing you are using a good bait that they want and will start to seek out.
LOVELY LIQUIDS…
With such a good stock of carp present in my venue, I made the choice early on to use predominantly boilies in my loosefeed mix. But instead of using them straight out of the bag, so to speak, I do something a little bit different to them in order to really ramp up their attraction and draw the fish in quicker.
I start off by taking my Krill boilies out of the freezer and adding the desired amount to a bucket. I then take some Pure Krill Liquid and give them a good coating. The Pure Krill is a really thick, salty liquid that’s rich in nutrients and serves a number of purposes. First, if the bait has been cleared out on the lakebed, there will still be that thick, heavy liquid tainting the bottom which the carp can detect and root out.
The liquid is also very sticky, which means that it adheres to the bait really well and gets straight to the lakebed without washing off the baits on the way down, as can be the case with inferior, less viscous liquids. Its tacky and sticky nature also helps it act as a binding agent for powders, which I will come on to shortly. Before the powder, I add some hemp oil to the boilies. Being oil, it will rise to the top from the lakebed, and this will serve to push those enticing smells up in the water column and give me a flat spot over the baited area when the fish are feeding.
POWDER THEM UP!
Once the boilies and hemp oil have been given a good shake about in the bucket, I add some Krill Powder. I don’t skimp on how much I use, either, as I really want it to cling to the boilies and mix with the liquids. Once this mix has been left for about an hour, the result is loads of ‘crusty’ boilies, coated in those amazing liquids and powder and oozing
“I like to do something a little bit different to my boilies in order to really ramp up their attraction”
attraction into the water around them.
When I spod this out, all the powders and liquids will make their way to the bottom, which is where I want them to be. If I were to add them last thing, most of the liquids and powder would end up going all over my back, which is hardly ideal, or would hang up in the water column soon after the spod has hit the surface, and not make it anywhere near the bottom.
The beauty of my customised boilies is that you don’t need to use a lot of bait if you don’t want to.
A kilo of this mix will be pumping out more attraction than 5kg of boilies straight out the bag, so it could actually save you money in the long run.
MEGA SESSION
Since I have started using this mix, my results have been superb. Having caught a few fish on the first trip, I was back again the following week. I managed a few fish on the first night of the second visit… and then the following morning it went off big time!
I ended up catching five fish, including two crackers over 30lb.
The fizzing of the feeding fish and the slicking of the oil on the surface lasted all morning and proved that the fish were clearly on it. If I had been using bog-standard
boilies straight out of the bag, good as they are, I know I wouldn’t have managed such a tally. They were ripping up the bottom big time in search of the source of all the attraction.
RIGS TO RELY ON
When it comes to the hookbaits I like to fish over the top of my loosefeed, I have been catching all my fish using bright squid-flavoured pop-ups presented on 360 rigs. Whenever I fish over a bed of bait, I always like to use ‘bright ones’ as I feel it helps me to get quicker bites.
I also like to have all three rods spread out on the same baited spot, and to put a different colour of pop-up on each – normally white, pink and yellow. If they show a definite preference for one over the others, I can then easily switch all three rods to the ‘winning formula’.
When the fish get on the bait with this kind of approach, the action can come thick and fast, and in summer this is often around dawn or at least until the sun has risen properly.
In order to fully capitalise on these magical feeding spells I make sure that I have plenty of rigs tied up in advance. I like to keep things simple, and use fluorocarbon booms to ensure that my rig doesn’t tangle on the cast, something that would eat away into this precious time when the fish are having it. Using fluorocarbon booms also ensures that the rig will reset perfectly should it get ejected or moved about by feeding fish. The last thing I want is to have three rigs sitting there on the bottom, tangled and surrounded by big carp that are up for a meal.
Being organised like this and having rigs ready to go can turn a two-fish morning in to a four or five-fish one.
My advice would be to stick to a rig that you are happy with and which isn’t too intricate. Having to play around with things that you are not confident with is simply time wasted.
So why not give my ‘boosted boilies’ a go this summer on your venue?
Often cracking the big-carp code is simply a case of doing something different to everybody else…
“Often cracking the big-carp code is simply a case of doing something different to everybody else…”